The relevance of folkloristics to the analysis of modern narrative

Abstract

It is well known that the literary analysis of narrative structure has derived inspiration from anthropological studies of verbal folklore, the most notable source being Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale.¹ The felt relevance of such studies to the analysis of modern literary narrative, however, is based on intuition rather than on a careful consideration of the necessary premises. The adoption of folkloristic methods into literary narrative analysis occurred under the general influence of structuralism, Propp’s morphology itself offering an essentially structuralist method, while its application to a different corpus, literature, seemed sanctioned by the interdisciplinary orientation of structuralist methodology. This folkloristically inspired tradition has been greatly developed and sophisticated, especially in France, and in combination with textual linguistics;² but rather than review the various current theories I wish to draw attention to their point of origin.